October 2013 what is up with the west

What’s Up in the West?

October 2013

Gamma - KKPsi

This past month Gamma has kept busy with fundraising, social projects, service projects, goal setting and special guests! We’ve been selling band gear for the Husky Marching Band including awesome lanyards, window clings, and retro sweat pants! We hosted a get together at Gameworks as well as pumpkin carving to celebrate the season. At our last football game we were joined by the Cal pep band for a post-game performance that was a blast.

This month we were able to help organize the School of Music’s library and send a pep band to Tenino High School for their annual Marching Festival (shout out to Andrew Bowerly, Tenino High School’s band director and a brother from Gamma!). And finally, we were visited by our chapter sponsor and director of the Husky Marching Band Brad McDavid for a great talk about goal setting and being an effective chapter. Look out for an update of the awesome things we have planned next month including our first degree!

Omicron - TBSigma

Hello Western District,

For October, Omicron has been busy. Our first big service project occurred this year. During our fall break, we had a voluntary big trash clean up close to campus.

With eleven participants, Omicron hosted a successful project, cleaning up a park and streets of Salt Lake City.

Not only active members were present, candidate members volunteered their own free time to clean the streets. For two hours, the streets became spotless in the heavy fall moisture.

The University of Utah marching band was allowed to go to two trips for October. A small pep band of seventy had flown down to Arizona. With this trip, we met Mama Omega. In the Wildcats stadium, we were welcomed with open arms, showered with gifts and smiles. The second trip was to USC, where we took our whole marching band. They visited the coliseum and Omicron created snack bags for the long thirteen and a half-hour drive back to Utah.

Volume 1 Issue 2

PsiEK - KKPsi & TBSigma

It has been a busy month for PsiEK here at UCLA. We have been serving our band by painting the numbers on our practice field and by teaching band members the singing parts to Hail, our alma mater. Not only that, but we literally served the band by offering Diddy Riese cookies at Hail learning, and by providing snack bags to Cal’s visiting band. Yum yum! Speaking of which, both of our chapters had bake sales this month. We are excited for the rest of marching season and are getting ready for recruitment! Go Bruins!

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Omega - KKPsi

October has been a busy month for the Omega Chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi. On Saturday, October 26, the Joint Omega chapters ran the 60th annual University of Arizona Band Day. Band Day is a high school marching band competition that had 40 High School Bands perform from Arizona and New Mexico. It also features two exhibition performances from the Pride of Arizona Marching Band. The joint chapters, alumni, prospective members and candidates worked all day to make sure that Band Day was a success.

We also had a service project with the Boys and Girls Club and volunteered at Slaughterhouse, a local haunted house in Tucson.

We also are looking forward to putting our 15 prospective members through Second Degree next weekend. We are looking forward to the rest of the semester!

Omega - TBSigma

TBSigma Omega has had a very exciting month. We participated twice at Slaughterhouse, the local terrifying Halloween haunt. Sisters and brothers of Omega got transformed into clowns, butchers, and zombies and delightfully scared a ton of Tucsonans!

It was a blast to help out the Tucson community and the activity also acted as a fundraiser for both organizations!

This month we also participated in one of our favorite TBSigma service events, something called New Beginnings.

Previous to this year, New Beginnings was a battered women and children shelter but currently it is just a children’s center. For the event, we make food for the residents and play music for them in hopes of providing them a fun time and good eats! It’s great to interact with the children and talk to them about music.

This month the University of Arizona’s Pride of Arizona marching band also hosted their Family Weekend activities, which was operated primarily through KKPsi and TBSigma and the UA Band Program. We provided food, sold merchandise, and had a great weekend celebrating our win over the Utah Utes at the football game. The weekend after, we hosted the UA Band Day, which is one of our biggest service projects of the year! KKPsi and TBSigma run the entire event from 4:30am to after midnight, running each station, selling merchandise, assisting the bands in the warm-up, helping the judges, and providing other services to the attendees and participants. Band day was a raging success this year, with a full schedule of bands and massive amounts of attendees.

TBSigma also participated in some other events this month, such as pumpkin collecting at Pumpkin Palooza, a trip to the Reid Park Zoo, working at the Community Food Band of Southern Arizona, an instrument supply drive, and created Halloween Gift bags for patients at the Diamond Children’s Medical Center.

We’re excited for what’s coming up in November!

Beta Omicron- KKPsi

The Sun Devil Marching Band kicked off October with a weekend road trip to Dallas, Texas to play Notre Dame in the Cowboys’ Stadium. Though we lost in a very close game, it was still great to perform in a larger stadium and bond all weekend with our Brothers and fellow bandmembers. When you spend over 40 hours on a bus with your section, you get to know them pretty well!

Upon returning home, Beta Omicron immediately wrapped up Pre-Prospective Discussion and Voting. Our Delta Nu class—consisting of 23 members—went through 1st Degree on October 20th.

We’re so excited for them to begin their journeys to becoming Brothers! We have also adjusted our Prospective Interview Plan to suit our chapter’s huge size, so the Prospectives will not be required to interview all active Brothers. Instead, active Brothers select the Prospectives they would prefer to interview, and then the Prospectives will be given lists of the certain Actives they must interview.

Hopefully this will make the process much less stressful for both Prospectives and Actives!

Beta Omicron also hosted two major events this month, a week apart: Homecoming and ASU Band Day. Miranda Van Horn, our Alumni Relations Officer, did a fantastic job of organizing instrument rentals, water stations, and post-rehearsal snacks for the returning alumni, and all of us enjoyed welcoming older Brothers back for the weekend. Then, on October 26th, all Active Brothers pulled together to run ASU Band Day, a high school marching competition hosted by the Sun Devil Marching Band. Arriving at the stadium at 6am, Brothers worked diligently all day hosting bands, selling tickets, filling water jugs, and simply making sure the entire day flowed smoothly. The day concluded with the Sun Devil Marching Band’s performance of their “Styx and Stones” show. This show is the most important show of the year, since we are playing for so many potential SDMB members. Who knows…

Some of our future Brothers could have been sitting in those stands!

Prospective Membership Classes start very soon, and we’ll also be welcoming our Chapter Field Representative, Yvonne Daye, for her visit at the beginning of November. Lots to look forward to!

Gamma Kappa - KKPsi

This past weekend, Gamma Kappa held our 2nd Degree; it went very well with both candidates and readers. We are now preparing for NAU Band Day this weekend which should go very well. Our band is ready and we cannot wait to host multiple high schools again this year. We have also begun spreading the joint bond beyond our sister chapter, Alpha Chi, to the other two chapters in the music building, Phi Mu Alpha and Sigma Alpha Iota. We are finally reconnecting and slowly but martially making one massive joint bond. We already learned about Phi Mu Alpha and in a couple of weeks, we are learning about Sigma Alpha Iota. Even though we have experienced the first snowfall here in Flagstaff, the chapter is heating up for our CFR visit in November!

Iota Pi- KKPsi

This past month, our chapter has been quite busy due to the intense schedule that comes with marching season, on top of several other performances we have given on campus. Multiple bands played at a Parents’ Weekend concert, after which we hosted a reception. We had wonderful brothers who were not in the marching band step up and help sell tickets to a faculty recital while most of the chapter was at an away game against UC Davis. The chapter has also been actively hosting recruitment events throughout the month - we held three different events that our potential prospective members could attend: a brotherhood event, a service event, and a music event.

Next, we hosted “Getting to Know Iota Pi”, where our PPMs rotated around tables and discussed information related to the themes of the previous events with each of the brothers. We were lucky to have our CFR, Yvonne Daye, attend the event as well and visit our chapter. We are about to begin our interview process, where we will get to know the PPMs even better!

Lambda Psi - KKPsi

Lambda Psi had a very successful second degree! It has been an exciting Fall semester for San Jose State University music, as the Kappa Kappa Psi chapter is putting through more candidates than they currently have active members. We recently had a fun visit from our Chapter Field Representative, Yvonne Daye, which went really well. The chapter prepared for a Halloween Party and costume contest for the SJSU School of Music, delivered Halloween candy grams, Homecoming with the Spartan Marching Band, and an away game trip to Las Vegas all in one week.

Hello and welcome to the Second Edition of What is Up with the West? I hope that everyone is having a great quarter/semester! I hope that you read these articles and talk with other chapters and get to know what they have been up to. Also, please keep on submitting articles to Accent!

Hillary Tung Western District Publisher 2013 - 2014